Tranquillity
by flaurelcasfino
Summary: Frank needs to clear the air with Laurel, whether she wants to talk or not. Inspired by S4E5 promo, set post S4E4 so beware of spoilers! Canon (for now), Flaurel, M rated, one shot.


**A/N: So the promo for the next episode was such a tease, I had to imagine what happens next for myself because waiting until Thursday still feels like too long. This probably won't be how it goes down in the show, but it was fun to dream up. I hope you like it!**

* * *

It's late on a Friday evening when he knocks on Wes' door... her door. It opens quickly; she's been expecting him.

Frank arches a single eyebrow at Laurel as he steps in when he registers the unmistakeable smell of burnt toast and ramen noodles. "You already ate?"

"You're not here to feed me," she says stubbornly, still refusing to let him be anything to her but a glorified sex toy. A play thing. The gigolo he had tried so hard not to be.

Frank holds up the bag of ingredients he's brought to whip up something rich, Italian and, Laurel knows, much tastier and more nutritious than what she did eat. "But I brought-"

"Save it," she mutters, taking the bag from him and dropping it unceremoniously to the floor. "I don't care." She steps towards him, the look on her face wanting and almost predatory. Her mouth is etched into the permanent frown she wears these days, but her eyes are dark with want and Frank is almost certain he's starting to see something beneath the careful blue layer of distance. A small sign of life, like a sprout beginning to push its way through the soil.

Her hand flutters against his shoulder, pushing him back with no force at all. She moves him by sheer force of will and he is a prisoner to her every desire, enchanted by her spell and willing to grant her every wish. When his back touches the closed door, her mouth covers his instantly, her lips pressing and urgent and forcing his open, her breaths coming quick and shallow and needy.

His hands drop automatically to her waist, feeling her hips surge against him and his blood boils with want and need and he so badly wants to let her continue, let her fuck him for the fifth… no, sixth time in just a few days. Her hands are at his belt, pressing and pulling, and he knows he could just let his inner turmoil go and let it happen. In less than a minute, he could have her pressed up against this door, legs wrapped around his waist, panties on the floor, slide into her, feel her head fall against his shoulder, her moan gasped against his bicep, her wet heat around him, her walls drawing him in deeper and deeper each time…

But Frank knows he's got to draw a line here, and sooner rather than later. Much as he enjoys the mindless fucking – and he _really_ enjoys the mindless fucking – he wants more from Laurel. He wants more _for_ Laurel and there's too much left unsaid in the gaping void between them for this to continue. It's going to destroy them both.

"Wait…" he says, his voice a timid and unconvincing prayer.

Laurel reaches up a hand to turn his head, moves her lips to the edge of his jaw and kisses that sweet spot just beyond where his beard ends and before his ear begins. She's all tongue on his neck and teeth on his earlobe and Frank bites out a groan.

"Laurel…"

A sound of annoyance escapes her throat as her hands finish their job and his slacks are loose and pushed halfway down his thighs. Her fingers tease along the waistband of his boxers and then trail down to find him at half-mast already, her feather-light touch driving him crazy. "What? You don't want this?" she whispers against his neck and then she starts to sink down to her knees.

"Stop," he tells her, finally finding his voice. He moves his hands to still hers and he tugs gently, pulling her back up to her feet with no resistance.

Her gaze meets his eyes and she seems to assess what she sees there for a moment, judging his balance of logic and lust. "Fine," she says after a moment, her voice cool and clear. She takes a step back and shrugs. "You can leave." Then she turns and heads towards the bed, shrugging the jacket off her shoulders as she goes.

Frank sighs, rubs his hand across his face and pulls his pants back up. "Laurel, wait…" He turns around to face the bed to see Laurel laid down, skirt hiked up, kicking her lacy panties off of her ankle. She meets his eye and then slowly, deliberately, spreads her legs and starts drawing careful circles against her clit.

"I said you could go," she says weakly, her movements not faltering. She moans then and Frank can't help but feel that she's hamming it up slightly for his benefit. "I don't need you." Her fingers dip inside herself and Frank can see how wet she is from half the room away. His head spins in a confusing mixture of lust and concern, but he can't make himself look away.

"We gotta talk, Laurel," he manages to get out, voice surprisingly steady considering that all of the blood in his body has migrated south.

"You said-" She pauses to gasp slightly as she adds another finger. "-whatever I need. I don't need to talk."

"Yeah, well. I do."

"Unless you're gonna talk dirty, I don't wanna hear it."

Frank shrugs, manages to finally tear his eyes away to look around the room. "It's okay. I'll wait," he says, as though Laurel's merely doing her hair. He turns his back on Laurel and goes to the desk on the opposite wall, rifling through some paper before picking up a particularly dry-looking law textbook. He flicks it open and stares at the random page he's landed on, pretending to be enraptured by its contents, pretending that it's not taking such a colossal effort to not just go to her and give her what she clearly wants.

For a few minutes, the room is silent save for the flicking pages of the book and Laurel's ragged breathing. Finally, Frank hears a low growl and the bed creaks. He chances a glance over and sees Laurel sitting up, red-faced and glaring at him. "Get out," she hisses.

Frank can't hide his smirk. "Sorry, am I distracting you?"

She huffs, stands up and tugs her skirt back down, before crossing the room and snatching the book out of his hands. She drops it back on the desk and then pushes him forcefully towards the door. Snatches up his grocery bag and forces it into his arms and then opens the door, holding it for him wordlessly.

Frank sighs, his heart tugging a little in his chest at how furious and hurt and lost she is. "I ain't leavin', Laurel," he says, quietly.

"Yes. You are." Her eyes narrow and her shoulders curl in, her entire stance giving off red, hot rage and he wants to look away; knows that if he stares too long at the sun, he'll be blinded.

"Just give me ten minutes," he says. "Five, even."

Laurel holds her chin up stubbornly, doesn't give him the satisfaction of a response.

"Doucheface told me…"

Suddenly her face drops and her expression becomes cautious, guarded. "What? What did he say?"

Frank feels himself hesitate, wonders at her reaction. "He said how much you've been calling Michaela… he's worried about you." He watches her face carefully as she seems to relax, her expression regaining its careful nonchalance.

"Well, he shouldn't. Michaela is…" She pauses for a moment and then shrugs. "Michaela is my friend. I'm allowed to call her."

Frank stares at her for a long moment. He knows she's up to something; he's not stupid and he's been watching her for weeks. Staying up 'til the crack of dawn, always alert, always sitting at her computer. What she's looking for, what she's doing, he's not sure. But he's certain it ain't good.

Laurel meets his gaze, unflinching, for a long moment. Then, out of nowhere, she sighs. "Two minutes," she says in a small voice. "And if I don't like what you say, you've got to go."

"Whatever happened to freedom of speech?" he asks with a teasing smile, but he's hiding the overwhelming relief that washes over him at her acquiescence.

"Frank." Her tone is warning, no-nonsense.

"Fine, fine."

She stares at him for just a moment longer and then pushes the door shut again, leans against it. "Go on then, what do you want?"

"You don't wanna sit?"

She shakes her head, looking bored already. "One minute fifty."

Frank sighs, stares at her, ponders what he had planned to say. He'd wanted to build up to it, get her on side, talk about this huge issue like grown-ups… but she wasn't giving him much of a chance.

"One minute thirty, Frank," she says in a voice that could cut glass.

"It's just…" He sighs, rubbing the back of his neck. "That night…" He trails off, lets the reminder hang in the air of the night he came back to Philly and she reluctantly took him in. Harsh words spoken across a dark room until bitterness turned into yearning and yearning turned into touching, skin against skin, gentle caresses, the feeling of coming home, watching her fall apart beneath him, an unspoken promise that the puppy would never know but the feeling of certainty, of rightness, the inevitability of them.

Laurel's face remains impassive, though he's sure she's intelligent enough to know where this is going.

Frank braces himself, muscles tense, breathes in, breathes out and then releases the words into the world, setting them free. "Are you sure the baby's not mine?"

Her eyes glaze over then and she stares straight ahead, careful to give nothing away. Her expression seems stricken but he can't work out whether that's a good thing or not, whether it reveals an answer to his question or not. And it pisses him off because he can read other people like a book, can see their feelings and secrets as clearly as if they were tattooed upon their skin, but Laurel… Laurel is an enigma, a mystery, and she somehow manages to keep him out of her head time after time.

"No," she breathes eventually and then her mask snaps back into place. Her eyes are all fire but no smoke, and her lips press into a thin line that makes him want to joke that she needs to stop thinking so hard.

"So… no, it's not mine or no, you're not sure?"

Her eyes flash with thinly veiled fury. "No. It's Wes' baby. Not yours." She sounds so sure, so certain, but to Frank the words sound like a line delivered by a highly skilled actor, words she's repeated so much they've become gospel.

"Are you sure? That night… we weren't very… careful. We didn't-"

Laurel seems so ready for a fight, all her feelings bubbling under her skin and ready to burst out of the seams, so Frank's surprised when suddenly tears spring to her eyes instead. "It's _my_ baby, okay?" she says, cutting him off, with all the emphasis of a fight but none of the spirit. "Mine. Not yours, not Wes', not Annalise's… mine. I'm the one who has to deal with this, no one else. So quit trying to stick some kind of claim on me. We're nothing, Frank, nothing. This?" She gestures wildly between them. "This is just sex. You don't get to come here and make me dinner and ask me things like that. I can do this without you and I can do this without Wes, I can do this without anyone. I'm not some weak ass pregnant bitch you need to save, I can save my damn self." She sighs, deep and heavy, and jerks her thumb at the closed door. "Now get out. Your two minutes are up." She doesn't open the door, though, or force him out. She simply seems to give up, crossing the room and sitting on the side of the bed, gripping the edge with curled fingers.

Frank hesitates, torn between what she wants and what he wants. Then, because he's selfish, he follows her and sits a little way down from her on the side of the bed. Silence stretches between them, but he waits, hoping his presence is at least a little comforting to her.

Laurel sniffs slightly then, and Frank looks over to see her hurriedly wipe away one stray tear. He sighs, feeling pain pierce his chest, hating how useless he is. "Laurel…"

She looks to him, all big blue eyes and deep, aching sorrow. "I don't know, okay?" she croaks, after a moment, her gaze dropping back to the carpet, her fingers toying nervously with the edge of the blanket. "I don't know who the damn father is."

Frank's heart stutters in his chest, stops, and then picks up again at double speed. But he pushes it aside and slides along the bed, slowly, not wanting to alarm her but wanting to be closer to her. Eventually, he reaches her side, sits a few inches away. Close enough to touch but maintaining that distance that sits so permanently between them. "It doesn't matter," he whispers, hoarsely, and her eyes cut to him, sudden and shocked.

"What?" Her voice is a stolen breath, lost in the air.

"I just…" He takes a breath to steady his own voice. "I need you to know, Laurel, I meant every word. I'm here for you, whatever you need, no conditions, no judgement, no rules. I'll wait as long as you need me to. Heck, I'll even do this sex thing with you if that's what you need but please, don't let that change anything. Don't use me and push me away because I'll do anything for you." He holds her gaze, desperate for her to see how sincere he is, how entirely he means this. "Anything."

Laurel is quiet for a moment and then she lets out a sound that is half a sigh and half a biting, sarcastic laugh. "Great," she mutters. "Now you feel all responsible."

Frank's jaw clenches and he tamps down his annoyance inside. "No, that's not what this is. It doesn't matter to me about the baby, whether it's Wes', whether it's… not. I love _you_ , Laurel, I do. And maybe I'm no good at it, maybe I don't love the right way or maybe I don't love you as well or as much as he did. But I came back here because of you. Everything I am is yours now. And maybe you don't want to hear that, but I'll do anything, be anything you want me to."

"Even if I wanted you to leave me alone?"

Frank's broken and beaten down heart throbs in his chest again, wrangled by her words, her very existence. But still, he nods slowly. "If that's what you want."

Laurel is silent for what feels like an eternity. Then she looks at him, her lip caught between her teeth. "No," she admits, and then adds: "Not right now."

Frank can't help but feel as though he's made one of the most world-altering breakthroughs in the history of the planet. Forget electricity, the internet, life itself. Laurel has let him in and the relief that tingles through him reaches the very edges of his soul. He just nods, tries not to let Laurel see how she's just upended his universe. Then he stands. "Wanna get out of here?"

Laurel observes him, cautious. And then, miraculously, she nods once. It's a small, stiff nod, barely perceptible, but it's there all the same.

Frank feels his lips lift into a smile. "You might wanna change into something more comfortable," he says. "It's pretty cold out there."

Laurel doesn't reply but she does get up, cross the room, dig through her dresser for a moment before coming up with a pair of cosy-looking tracksuit bottoms and a baggy Middleton tee. Frank is expecting her to go to the bathroom to change so he's more than a little shocked when she pulls her top right over her head.

She notices him averting his eyes and scoffs. "It's nothing you haven't seen before, Frank."

He lifts his gaze back to her, hesitant, and she rolls her eyes as she slips the new top on, tugging it over her ever-changing torso. But not before Frank saw the small but defined bump sticking out between her hips. His breath catches in his throat a little at the sight. He'd never forgotten it, the baby, not for a second (how could he, when he'd had her body pressed tight against his in the darkness of this very room?) but seeing it there, changing her, is enough to make him marvel at her strength. How this very life-altering thing is so present for her every moment of every day, and yet she carries on, never loses herself to it.

When she's re-dressed and her sneakers are laced up on her feet, a hoodie shielding her body against the cold, she turns to him, hands on hips. "Where are we going?"

Frank just grins. "You'll see."

They stop at a convenience store briefly, Laurel opting to stay in the car as Frank goes inside and emerges a few minutes later with a grocery bag. He drives them out of the city, up a dirt track road off the highway. Eventually, they emerge on a clifftop viewing point which drops off to reveal a spectacular view of Philadelphia, lit up in the dark.

Laurel smirks. "Really? You're taking me dogging?"

Frank rolls his eyes at her. "Har har. There's no one else here, Laurel."

"It looks like an ideal site to me."

"Yeah, well. That's 'cos your mind's in the gutter these days."

"Don't I know it," she mutters, bitterness tinging the edges of her words.

Frank gets out the car, grabs his grocery bag and a blanket and comes around to the passenger side to open the door for Laurel. "You say dogging," he says as she gets out, "I say romantic."

She laughs then, and it's almost a genuine, real laugh. "Tomato, tomahto, right?"

"Exactly."

They seat themselves on the blanket and Frank grabs the grocery bag, pulling out two pints of ice cream and a big bottle of wine.

"Frank," Laurel cautions, "I can't drink that."

He tips the bottle to show her the label. "Non-alcoholic."

She snorts. "So you take me dogging and feed me grape juice… romantic."

He raises his eyebrows. "Fine, I won't give you the rest if you're gonna go all spoiled princess on me. You hardly gave me time to plan the date of the century here."

"So this is a date?"

Frank sighs, realising he's digging his own grave here. "No… God, I don't know, Laurel. It's just ice cream and fake wine."

She nudges his shoulder with hers. "Relax," she tells him. "I'm just teasing."

He thinks that her voice lacked the good-natured tone of teasing but wisely says nothing. He can see she's still holding onto a lot of pain and anger, so he lets her off. Not to mention she still hasn't got her rocks off yet so Frank knows she's probably more than a little bit frustrated.

"What else is in the mystery bag?"

He dips into the bag again, draws out a cake box.

Laurel's eyes widen instantly. "Tres leches?"

"What else?" Frank feels pride swell inside him at the confirmation that he knows Laurel enough to know exactly what she'd be craving. He may not know every detail about her like he feels he should, may have damaged their relationship enough now that there may be things she'll never tell him, but at least he can do this.

"Okay, fine," she says, as she takes the cake from him and he produces a fork with a flourish, "this isn't half bad, Delfino."

"Nothin' a bit of tres leches can't fix."

"I can think of a few things," Laurel mutters bitterly, destroying the tentative jovial mood, forever lashing out.

Frank sighs, knowing he's said the wrong thing yet again and feeling the sting of her sharp words. He knows she's going through a hurricane of emotions, exacerbated by hormones and a lack of sleep, but she's not holding back and it's starting to really bruise. He reaches into the bag for the last item, his own luxury item. He unscrews the cap and takes a mouthful of the whisky right from the bottle, and then he steels himself and embraces the pain of her retorts because it means he's here with her.

Beside him, Laurel does a 180 and hums contentedly around a forkful of cake. "God, I fucking love cake."

Frank chuckles and cracks open the ice cream. "How's your job going?"

"Fine, I guess." She pauses and then shrugs. "I mean, Bonnie kind of hates me but that's okay."

"Bonnie does not hate you."

"It's fine, I don't mind. I know it's not personal. I'm just 'one of the kids' to her, always will be." Laurel smirks at him. "I'm about to be a mom and I'm still not allowed up at that grown-ups' table of yours."

"You really think I'd've screwed you if I thought of you as a kid?"

"I don't know," Laurel says around a mixture of ice cream and cake, "who knows what kind of creepy kinks you've got up your sleeve?"

Frank just rolls his eyes. "Not that," he assures her.

She pauses to swallow and then says, "Thanks, though. For putting in the word with Bonnie. I do appreciate it."

"Anytime."

"You know Denver's running for Attorney General?" Laurel says then, her words casual but her tone betraying an emotion he can't pinpoint.

"No," he replies, truthfully a little surprised. "Does Bonnie know?"

"Mmm-hmm. She's helping him run his campaign."

"Huh." Frank takes another mouthful of Cherry Garcia, ponders that for a moment, wonders why Bonnie chose to keep that bit of information to herself.

"Bonnie's good at hiding things, huh?" Laurel says then.

Frank's mind immediately skips to Rebecca, her empty eyes, her waxy skin, her weight in that suitcase. He remembers how he'd suspected Laurel before he'd even considered that Bonnie could have had anything to do with it. "Yeah," he says slowly, "I guess she is."

"It's always the quiet ones." Laurel grins at him as she echoes Annalise's words from another life ago.

Frank shakes his head at her, cocking one sharp brow conspiratorially as he thinks of how incredibly _unquiet_ Laurel can be sometimes. "Yeah, 'cos you're such a quiet little mouse."

She just shrugs.

It's quiet then as they sit, side-by-side eating ice cream and providing a silent crutch of support to each other. Frank wonders, suddenly, whether Laurel's implying that she's hiding something, too, but he doesn't have time to think about that further.

"The last time I spoke to Wes, we had a fight," she confesses, abruptly, out of nowhere, rendering Frank a little speechless. She pauses for a minute or two, allows her words to linger, and then she looks at him. "Aren't you going to ask me what about?"

Frank shrugs. "Nah. It's up to you, if you wanna tell me."

Laurel rolls her eyes, seemingly good-natured despite the heavy turn the conversation just took. "You're so fucking noble," she mutters and then sighs. "We were fighting… about you."

"Me?"

"Yeah, you. I lied, told him you didn't know about us. But then I did tell him and he was mad…"

"You told him about… what we did? That night?"

Laurel shakes her head slowly. "No, not that." Her hands curl into tight fists, her knuckles strained white. "I'm such a _horrible_ person. For what I did to him. He didn't deserve any of that and I didn't… I didn't get a chance to apologise. He never got a chance to be mad at me, to hate me. He's… gone and there are so many things I did wrong and I can't make it right."

The tears that have been bubbling within her all day have finally broken through now, run down her splotchy cheeks like a dam that's burst its banks. "I can't do right by him now, it's too late, and I just wish…" She draws in a ragged breath. "I just wish none of it had ever happened. Everything was so great when we were friends, and this… this thing between us ruined everything. Now there's this-" she gestures wildly at her belly "-and it's just something else I fucked up." Laurel looks at him and her eyes are pleading, desperate for Frank to understand. "That's why it has to be Wes'. There has to be something that I didn't mess up. I can't have been dating him and gotten knocked up by another guy!" She looks out over the lights and laughs, darkly, bleakly. "If this baby isn't Wes'… I'm the most awful type of person there is, and he can't even know how evil I am because he's gone. I'll never have to face the consequences for this. Don't you see? I have committed the worst crimes against him and I'm _getting away with it_. How is that fair? For Wes? For this goddamn baby? Hell, even for you?"

She barely stops for breath, just charges on ahead, like now she's started she can't stop. "I thought it was you. That killed him."

"I know," Frank says quietly, remembering her harsh words to him in that hospital room, remembering the black glare of her eyes, remembering how he had ached when he knew how much he had hurt her.

"No, but I _really_ thought it was you. I thought you'd gone all jealous-ex on me and murdered Wes because you couldn't bear the thought of me being with someone else." She laughs again and all Frank can do is listen as she sits and burns, a ball of self-loathing fire, spitting out flames at anyone that dares to approach. "I mean, how fucking self-centred is that? Everything I know about you, about Wes… I disregarded it to fulfil my own stupid fucking fantasy that I'd ever be that important to someone." Laurel turns to him then, takes both of his hands in hers and squeezes tightly, her cold fingers grasping at him like he's an anchor holding her to Earth. "Frank… I'm _so sorry_. For what I said to you. For what I did to you."

"It's-"

"Please don't. If you value my sanity, don't tell me it's okay or it's fine. Because it wasn't."

"Okay," he consents, "it wasn't okay, or fine. But I forgive you."

Laurel nods, allowing that much.

"And, for the record," Frank continues, "you do mean that much to me."

She gazes at him and he thinks he sees her soften, just a little. "I know." She drops his hands then, but draws a little closer to his side so that the lengths of their legs are touching, from their thighs down to their outstretched calves. Hesitantly, Frank reaches his arm out, encloses it gently over her shoulders. She tenses, as he expected, but settles quickly, nestling into his side as though it were a suit tailored to her exact measurements. They stare out over the lights of the city, silent and pondering the implications of the things they've shared tonight.

Laurel is the one who steps out into the silence, cracks it like a plane of ice that can't quite hold the weight of her words. "What are we, Frank?" She turns slightly under his arm, looks up at his face.

He stares back at her face, his eyes tracing the familiar shape of her nose, her lips, her jawline, circling back up to those pale blue-grey pools he knows so well, the waters of her eyes momentarily calm, devoid of the choppy waves he's been seeing lately. His lips quirk up on one side. "I don't know," he admits, "but we can start with friends?"

"Friends," Laurel repeats, pressing her lips together, mulling it over.

"Really, really good friends." Frank punctuates his amendment with a squeeze of her shoulders.

Laurel cuts a wicked grin at him. "Best friends? BFFs?"

"Slow down, don't want Prom Queen to get jealous."

She laughs, rolls her eyes, and lapses back into a comfortable silence. But it doesn't last long. "How about… really, really good friends who sometimes have sex?"

Frank pretends to think about it. "I think I can stretch to that."

"Great." Laurel breaks out from his hold and stands up, brushing her legs off. "Your place or mine?"

He laughs, rubs a hand through his beard. "You're insatiable," he mutters, but he takes her outstretched hand and lets her help him to his feet.

They head back towards his car, blanket in hand, and Frank answers her question with a teasing, quirked eyebrow: "It'd better be your place, unless you want to show Bon exactly how much of a grown-up you are."

Laurel's laugh echoes around them, then quickly disappears into the darkness, and her eyes swim with a temporary humour that melts Frank's heart. Everything's not okay, everything's definitely not forgiven just yet, but tonight… tonight they've put down their armour and found their own little moment of tranquillity.

For now, Frank's world is at peace.


End file.
